“Apprenticeships are key to closing the digital skills gap in the UK. The Chancellor said he will also raise spending on skills and training by £3.8bn over the parliament, an increase of 42%. The government intends to double the available scholarships for AI and Data Science Master’s conversion courses with a £23 million investment for under-represented groups. Moray Wright, CEO at Parkwalk : “It’s great to see the continued commitment to R&D spending, which will help the UK maintain its position as a world leading innovator and university powerhouse, and the investment is attempting to translate more of this innovation into value back to UK plc, rather than taken overseas.” Skills investment “Entrepreneurs and businesses need to be assisted on their journey – making sure they are supported and are receiving the right amount of funding.” “The government’s investment towards R&D and innovation is welcome but there needs to be encouragement at the early stage investment level in order to ensure this innovation results in growth,” said Sarah Barber, CEO of Jenson Funding Partners. The government also plans to reform R&D tax reliefs to support modern research methods. He said the government will also support private R&D investment by increasing funding for core Innovate UK programmes, reaching circa £1 billion per year by 2024-25, over £300 million more per annum than in 2021-22. Sunak plans to increase public investment in UK R&D to £20bn by 2024-25, representing an increase of around a quarter in real terms. With the country experiencing a severe developer skills crisis, open source will enable the health service to tap into resources from the world’s best developers and accelerate digitalisation strategies, rather than waste precious time and resources coding from scratch.” R&D changes

“For the investment to be successful, it is also critical that initiatives leverage open source to optimise efficiencies and mitigate developer skills shortages. However, the success of online vaccination bookings and the COVID pass proves what can be achieved with digitalisation, and should be emulated with this new funding. “An obvious example is with the NHS Track and Trace programme, which the Public Accounts Committee has criticised as being a waste of taxpayers’ money that did not achieve its objectives. “All too often in recent years we have seen government pledges of digital transformation in our health service fail to have any meaningful impact on the quality of patient care,” said Tom Bianchi, VP marketing, EMEA at Acquia. This will be paid for by a new Health and Social Care Levy, along with an increase to the rates of dividend tax, which will raise around £13bn per year for spending on health and social care across the UK. The government pledged £2.1 billion over the next three years to support digital technology to connect hospitals and other care organisations.

What did the tech sector make of the government’s fiscal plans? Digital health investment The Chancellor revealed plans for digital health and tech skills investment, R&D changes, space industry funding and a cash pot for regional angel investors.

Rishi Sunak’s third Budget outlined the government’s plan to ease the nation out of COVID-19.

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